


Ripeness is All

by savithny



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, BAMF!John, Doctor and a Soldier, Episode Tag, Episode: s02e02 The Hounds of Baskerville, Experimenting on John is Not Good, Explosions, Gen, Guilty!Sherlock, IEDs Kill People, It Wasn't in the Sugar, PTSD, Sherlock Got It Wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-07
Updated: 2012-07-07
Packaged: 2017-11-09 08:21:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/453354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savithny/pseuds/savithny
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Hounds of Baskerville filler:  Sherlock didn't feel guilty about the incident in the lab.  He was less comfortable with happened afterwards.  People blowing up is not in his John Watson Users Guide.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ripeness is All

Contrary to popular opinion, Sherlock did care what happened to John Watson. 

John was _important._ While Sherlock had long grown accustomed to working alone, he had recently realized there was something very different, and _better_ , about working _with_ someone. A daring chase through back alleys was even more invigorating when rehashed afterwards with someone else who’d been there. A particularly brilliant deduction felt even more satisfying when someone who wasn’t Sherlock expressed appreciation for it. 

Sherlock had to admit – if only to himself – that John Watson had improved his life. So much so that this morning, he had confessed as much to John, letting the admission fall from his lips reluctantly, striving to make John see how much he was needed, to make John come back to him.

“I don’t have friends. I’ve just got one.” 

Yes, Sherlock did care what happened to John. Which is why he had taken so much care in setting up his experiment. He _needed_ to gauge another person’s reaction to the drug being used on Henry. He _needed_ a normal person’s reaction. John was the logical choice – the only choice. Because John was so very, very, normal. 

But Sherlock knew he had to design the experiment with caution. While John was certainly more normal than he was, John’s brain had exhibited interesting tendencies where trauma was concerned. Psychosomatic limps and post-traumatic nightmares and tremors that went away rather than worsening when John was under stress. John had unusual reactions to stress. Probably because of his military training and near-death experience. 

Sherlock had deduced John’s war wound within moments of meeting him. The evidence was written on his face and body, in his posture and speech. He hadn’t thought a lot about what it meant to have a war wound, to be a “wounded warrior,” until later.

“If you were dying, if you were being murdered, in your last few seconds what would you say? “  
“Please God, let me live.”  
“Oh, use your imagination!”  
“I don't have to.”

He had been thrown, he had to admit, by John’s gritted-out “I don’t have to.” And then, loosened by that moment, the deduction he’d been grasping at had come through, crystal and sparkling and whole. He’d put Jennifer’s last words together with her life and come up with his answer, and in the rush of that moment, he had laid aside the other thought that had run through his brain before being discarded.

But later – after confronting the cabbie, after seeing the man drop like a poleaxed oxen with a neat hole drilled into his chest and a far messier one splayed across his back, after realizing the kind of person who had come to his aid, that thought had resurfaced.

“… clearly he's acclimatised to violence. He didn't fire until I was in immediate danger so obviously has a strong moral principle. You're looking for someone probably with a history of military service and nerves of steel...” 

He had been asking John about being _murdered,_ not just dying. How similar were the two? Wasn’t the possibility of dying in action something to be expected – or if not to be expected, certainly something that should not have been experienced as murder, as a surprise? Wasn’t that what military service was about? Risking death, not to prove you were clever, but simply because you’d been told to? Was being ordered to your death the same as being murdered?

That question – the difference between being killed and being murdered, between dying in battle and dying at the hands of a criminal -- had rattled around in his head far longer than usual for a thought not directly related to a case or a potential case or criminal behavior. Long enough that he’d gone looking for more data.

He had felt oddly unwilling to go directly to the source, given John’s habitually laconic answers to any questions having to do with his past. But though John’s first name was staggeringly common, his surname was not. Britain’s contribution to the forces fighting in the Middle East, whilst larger as a percentage of her population than that of some other nations, still only numbered in the thousands, only a few hundred of whom were doctors, only a handful of whom were in any way in a position to be shot. 

This meant that Sherlock had been able to fairly quickly dig up the basic outline of the story behind John’s war wound. There had been press releases. Official BBC articles. Names named on Remembrance Day and the Queens Birthday, posts on official military blogs and arty pieces written by freelance war correspondents and even a passing mention in an ITV special about RAF pilots. He knew he only had the bones and hardware of the story, but he had cross-referenced it with his own observations, and assembled his own personal John Watson Instruction Manual. 

And _of course_ he consulted that manual before designing the Baskerville Experiment. He’d been living with the man for months! He knew what gave John nightmares, what made his hand twitch and his leg shake, and he could do this safely. He made sure to plant plenty of prior canine imagery in John's mine, to spend the journey back to Baskerville discussing animals, animal testing, and cloning. The lab he chose to lock John into was sterile and cold and smelled of disinfectant and new equipment. The sounds he chose were specifically selected to steer John’s fears away from Afghanistan and towards a high-tech pharmaceutical lab environment. Nothing in his setup had any taste of the desert or a primitive medical setup. 

No explosions, no gunfire, no helicopters. Just a lab full of cages and the sounds of a dog. Sherlock was proud of how thorough he’d been about it. And it had worked. John had panicked, yes. John had seen the hound, and nothing else – and John had snapped out of the hallucinations quickly with Sherlock’s prompting, had gathered his wits about him like a military uniform and had followed Sherlock without hesitation and gone to find what they needed to find.

Sherlock had no regrets about his experiment. He was only regretting not forseeing what happened later. It was easy to tell himself that nobody could have predicted it, that minefields aren’t commonly encountered in the English countryside, that no one in their right mind would vault a strand of barbed wire held up by a post with a skull and crossbones on it. But he’s _Sherlock Holmes._ He has made his life’s work being able to see the patterns, predict the outcomes. He should have entertained at least the possibility of such an event. He should have kept John safely away from that minefield.

But he hadn’t. And John was right behind him as they emerged from the treeline and saw Dr. Frankland, standing like a statue, staring at his own foot. He heard John’s sharp intake of breath as Frankland looked back at them, down again, and then fixed his eyes back on them as he deliberately raised his foot off the pressure plate it had come down on. And then they all heard nothing but the explosion.

The first thing Sherlock heard after that, when his ears came back online, was an odd pitter-pattering, interspersed with louder, wetter, thumps. At first, he thought it was raining, but then he realized he was hearing the gravel and debris tossed into the air by the explosion landing all around them. He’d thought, for a long moment, that it was just earth and small rocks and bits of grass -- until he saw Henry turn and hide his face against the trunk of a tree, saw Lestrade wipe something off his arm and turn to retch into the bushes. And saw John’s familiar shocked look melt away and rearrange itself into something firm, distant, and aloof as his gait shifted into what Sherlock thought of as his Soldiering Walk and he paced quickly and efficiently towards an object right at the edge of the minefield, snarled in a curve of now-broken barbed wire. 

“Jesus, it’s pieces of him!” Lestrade choked out, wiping at his arm again. “Oh bloody hell, that man’s coming down on us in tiny fucking pieces!” He spat, and gagged again. 

Henry, arms around his head, face pressed into his own shoulder, moaned “No, oh God no, no….” Lestrade went to his side, checked quickly to see if he’d been injured by the gravel from the blast, and turned back to Sherlock. 

John approached them, holding both gloves and Henry’s handgun in his right hand. His left was darkly wet and slick. 

“Here, Greg, you’d best take this,” he said, handing Lestrade the weapon. “We’re going to need a coroners van out here – can you make the call so it’s official? I’m guessing that a full recovery is going to require a disposal team to clear a fairly large section of that field, but that’s up to the MOD. Blast of that size could have dispersed the remains over nearly a 100-meter radius, so what’s not here is probably still in there.”

Greg gaped at John at that, and Sherlock couldn’t stop himself from staring at John’s left hand. “John? Are you injured?”

“What?” John looked down, confused. “Oh, no. I’m fine.” His voice was completely calm, absolutely assured. “Frankland's dead. I mean, yeah, probably was a foregone conclusion, but I had to check.” John jerked his thumb back at the tangle of broken fencing, and Sherlock realized suddenly that the object snarled in the wires was human … had been human. Even legless, armless, head tilted at an impossible angle, it was still recognizable, even in the moonlight, as the remains of a man. He closed his eyes at a rising wave of dizziness, and heard Lestrade mutter “Christ!” under his breath. 

John continued, still quite calmly, “It only took a moment to check, but I had to. Saw a few with worse injuries make it back home, though I can’t say they walked out of the hospital under their own power. They were all wearing body armor though, and obviously he wasn’t, so the poor sod really didn’t have a chance….” He glanced around as though looking for something, before deciding his gloves answered his needs. He wiped his left hand as clean as he could on them, examined his fingernails quite clinically to be sure he’d got the worst of the gore from his cuticles. 

As John studied his fingers, Sherlock studied him. He knew John was good in a crisis, that he kept his wits about him and carried on, but this was more that that. Crisis John was still John, still one to shout a bit, and gasp in shock, and curse and perhaps run about. There were no instructions for this version of John in the Instruction Manual. 

John looked up and caught Sherlock watching him. He stared at his flatmate for a long moment, then glanced first at Lestrade and then at Henry. And Sherlock saw John’s mask flicker for the briefest of seconds, saw his lips narrow and the motion of his nostrils as he took a measured – specifically counted – breath in. Sherlock realized, then, that this face John put on was a face the Army had given him. John was pulling on years of training, conditioning, and experience to hold himself together in the face of sudden, shocking, violence. This was the man who had seen Sherlock in peril through two windows, across a dark alley, and had put one perfect bullet through another person to protect him. He’d deduced this man, but until that moment had never truly seen him in action.

With his next breath, John was giving orders. Not loudly, not importantly. He just started saying things that happened when he said them. 

“I see the boys at Baskerville were alert, looks like they’re coming out to see what happened.” He gestured at the lights streaming out of the gates and down the road. “Greg. You’ll want to call this in to the local authorities now. They’ll pass on the word to MOD and can send their own people in before Baskerville sweeps this under the rug.” Greg, unquestioning, pulled out his mobile and started flipping through his contacts. “Sherlock, Henry needs to _not_ be here when they arrive. He’s in no state to answer official questions. Get him back to his house, call his therapist and tell her what just happened. Don’t leave him alone. If she can’t come, have her send someone he trusts to stay with him.”

John turned back towards the road, fished the torch from his pocket, and turned it towards the line of lights in the distance. 

“John, what about…” Sherlock began.

“Take Henry and go, now. I will report to the Baskerville team and Greg and I will catch you up back at the Inn.” His voice, while not raised, carried a whip-crack of command to it, and Sherlock found himself taking Henry’s elbow, muttering “Come on then,” and “It’s alright now,” and “There there,” and other things he’d heard John say to crime victims who seemed distressed. He glanced backwards as he led Henry away, saw that Lestrade had turned away from the minefield to talk on his mobile, but that John had approached Franklin’s blasted corpse and was standing over it, staring down, hands firmly clasped behind his back. 

Getting Henry settled safely in his own house took far longer than Sherlock wanted, and by the time he returned to the Cross Keys Lestrade was there before him, installed at the bar with a full pint of beer in front of him. His face was greyish under his tan and his hands trembled as he lifted the glass. He put it down with a bump when he saw Sherlock in the main hall.

“Sherlock, there you are! How’s Henry? You didn’t leave him alone, right?”

“Of course not!” Sherlock scoffed. “John told me not to. Is he back?”

“Ah, yeah. We came back together. He went up to his room to have a wash.”

Sherlock thought, briefly, about texting. It appealed – brief, to the point, no eye contact required. But he desperately needed more information than John would give him that way. So he made his way upstairs and tapped lightly at John’s door. There was no immediate response, and he rapped harder, calling “John!” with his voice tight. 

“What is it? Sherlock? Everything alright?” John opened his door and looked up at Sherlock, concern visible across his face. John was still shrugging into his shirt, and the neckline of his vest was wet in a way that suggested he’d put his head under the tap not long ago. Even after living together for a year, Sherlock rarely saw his flatmate in anything less than a fully-buttoned collared shirt; it was only recently that John had even begun leaving his second button undone in the privacy of home. 

The open neckline and dampened cotton revealed the scars John usually made an effort to hide. The tiny white pucker at the base of his throat, the top of a larger surgical scar that looked as though it extended down the center of his chest, and the broad splash of a bullet’s exit in the pit of his collarbone near his shoulder. Sherlock stared, frankly fascinated by this rare glimpse at the way his friend’s career was written so legibly across his body. He wanted to touch the marks, to pull John’s vest askew so he could read this story in full, compare it with the dry, officious news articles and _comprehend_ it in the full meaning of the word. 

The official MOD statement on the incident merely said that Captain Watson had “come under fire by insurgents whilst evacuating casualties.” That John had been hit by a bullet that “passed through the armhole of his body armor,” but “continued to provide first aid to the wounded as long as he was able to do so.” More alarmingly, his teammate’s commendation described how, as the only remaining uninjured member of the medical team, she had “secured the airway” and then proceeded to “provide manual respiration” for some period of time until everyone was “extracted with assistance from the USAF.” 

None of those simple declarative sentences helped him understand this man any better.

Sherlock realized that he’d been staring at the same time that John, uncomfortable, yanked his shirt higher on his shoulders and began buttoning it from the top. 

“Sherlock? Is everything alright? Did you get Henry squared away?”

“Oh, yes. Yes!” Sherlock replied. “Doctor Stapleton is with him. And you … you handled … the other?”

John sighed and looked down at his buttons. He was having difficulty getting the last one through, his hand trembling enough to shake his whole shirtfront. With an impatient noise, he stuffed his shirttails into his waistband with the bottom button still undone. 

“The coroner arrived and took charge of the remains. The team from Baskerville will call in a team to retrieve anything still in the minefield. With any luck they’ll clear the minefield itself and prevent future …. mishaps.” He turned, picked up his jacket and shrugged it on. “Is Greg still downstairs? Because I could use a pint.”

The pint turned into three, turned into John and Greg sharing several rounds of whiskey. Sherlock watched, mostly silent, as the two men studiously avoided discussing the evening’s events. It wasn’t until both were very, very drunk and had grown maudlin that Greg finally said, “John, I’ve been to a lot of murder scenes. I’ve seen a lot of victims. I’ve never … never lost it that way. How….?”

“Over half the casualties I saw in Afghanistan on my last tour were IED attacks,” John replied. “Taliban sets more of them every year. Body armor keeps a lot of blokes alive, but _Christ_ they tear people apart.”

Lestrade nodded soberly. “I’m good at seeing people as people, even at their worst. It’s part of my job. But he, he was _meat_ afterwards. Bits and pieces and parts.”

John swallowed the rest of his drink in one go, held the glass in front of his eyes, examining the dregs and avoiding Lestrade’s gaze. “Greg, first one I saw I got sick too, after. And he wasn’t even dead.” The glass rattled against the bar as he put it down. “You get a bit used to it after awhile. You have to, when some of them are alive and need your help. Never gets easy, mind you, but … you have to cope, to help them, so you do.”

“No offense, John? But I don’t want to have to do what it takes to get there.”

Sherlock felt retorts bubbling up, one upon another. He bit them back. To John, to Lestrade, caring _was_ an advantage, and this ability to turn that off, make it stop, push it aside – it was hard for them to admit to each other, even drunkenly, even after a night that had seen them fearing for their lives, fighting a mythical beast, and picking bits of human flesh out of their hair. And Sherlock realized that the John he’d seen in the woods, who could calmly take the pulse of person reduced to a side of beef and then come up with appropriate action plans, was a man born in fire, forged by IEDs and grenades and landmines and rifle bullets. 

Sherlock thought, on balance, that he much preferred the John Watson that ranted about feelings and chastised him about timing and reminded him that crime victims were real people. 

More than that, though, Sherlock thought. John had never gone so cold and distant and rational on him before. Not when he was in personal danger, nor when he was racing after suspects, not even when he’d shot a man defending Sherlock. What was so different about tonight? Why was tonight not just another night on the battlefield? 

John hummed, clearly weighing his response to Lestrade. Finally, he spoke. 

“As long as you _can_ help them, Greg, its alright. You just have to push it back, for awhile. And then, when its over, when you’ve done everything you can have done, then it’s not so bad to think on, really.”

And that was it, Sherlock realized. What was different was that this time, there was no one left for John to help. He couldn’t prevent this, and couldn’t save anyone, and that left him stuffing his trembling hand in his pocket, left him walking out of the hotel bar and heading toward the stairs to his room with an odd hitch to his step that most observers would put down to drunkenness. John was a man of action, who drew strength from his ability to make a difference. And when that ability was gone, he felt its loss.

Through the wall, Sherlock heard John dream that night. He heard him cry out, heard the bedsprings creak as he tossed about before waking fully. He heard John get up and stick his head under the taps again, and then the creak of the small armchair as John gave up on sleep and sat by his window, waiting for the dawn.

By morning, though, John showed no sign that he’d had a difficult night. He prodded Sherlock about the coffee sugar, about being wrong about something. 

And Sherlock knew he had been wrong, more wrong than John knew. So he let it slide. Held his tongue, as much as he was able. Yes, he’d been wrong about the source of the drug – though not, he insisted to himself, about its existence – but he’d been _more_ wrong about something far more important. He’d been wrong about John Watson, about what made him special. And most of all, he suspected he may have been wrong about the disadvantages of caring.

**Author's Note:**

> Playing around with the idea that John's PTSD is as real as his adrenaline addiction, and why that might be. Backstory on the injury that got John sent home is the same as for my previous story, _Sometimes You Hear the Bullets,_ but I'm not sure this is a series just yet.
> 
> Title from Joseph Heller's Catch 22, Ch 41 -- The Death of Snowden. 
> 
> He felt goose pimples clacking all over him as he gazed down despondently at the grim secret Snowden had spilled all over the messy floor. It was easy to read the message in his entrails. Man was matter, that was Snowden’s secret. Drop him out a window and he’ll fall. Set fire to him and he’ll burn. Bury him and he’ll rot, like other kinds of garbage. The spirit gone, man is garbage. That was Snowden’s secret. Ripeness was all.


End file.
